Large Hadron Collider for sale
SEARCHING 91av‘s website for stories about the elusive Higgs particle, Trevor Dudley was startled to read an advert under the “Ads by Google” banner offering “The Large Hadron Collider” for sale. An added incentive was that you could “bid or buy on eBay with confidence” thanks to the company’s new buyer protection programme.
“Make sure you get it in writing” exhorts the Which? ad. It continues: “Get unlimited legal advice from the qualified lawyers at Which? – by email and phone”
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For Trevor, this raises a number of questions, such as: “Does it include batteries?” and “What form of protection does eBay have in mind for me?” The most significant, however, may be: “If I were successful in my bid, what would the postage cost?”
Instructions from the coalface
OUR recent discussion of quantum instructions such as “queue both sides” mentioned the assertion of a mathematician reader that such signs “do in fact make sense” (21 January). So we were pleased to receive a message from the quantum instructions coalface that develops the argument.
Graham Berry tells us that: “As a train dispatcher at Cambridge station (the bloke who literally blows the whistle for a living) I have long been aware of the incongruity of the verbal instructions I’m sometimes obliged to deliver (at high volume) such as ‘Please use all available doors!’ I often add the caveat ‘but not simultaneously’, and then, by way of clarification (this is Cambridge after all) ‘Unless you’re in some kind of quantum state’.
“Disappointingly, blank incomprehension is the usual response.”
THE European motor industry is at it again. Several readers have reported advertisements on the UK’s Classic FM radio station stating that the Audi Q3 SUV has an internal capacity of 1365 “cubic litres”. Our readers all point out that this would imply a nine-dimensional car – “handy”, Brian Darvell says, for “getting all that luggage in”.
The sad thing is that we have been here before. On 15 March 2008 we noted that there had been a series of full-page advertisements in 91av using this same nonsensical unit in describing a certain car engine’s capacity.
Our report concluded: “We are, of course, too polite to say which car, but if you guessed the car was Swedish, you wouldn’t be far wrong.”
When it comes to meaningless measurements, it seems that where the Swedes lead, the Germans follow.
READING about the finding of signs of a possible Higgs particle (91av, 17 December 2011, p 6), Mike Collings was “amused, if not a little confused” by the claim that two project leaders “separately presented the results from more than 300 trillion high-speed particle collisions…”.
We know exactly what our reporter meant, and by rooting around in the magazine’s production software we can see exactly how the phrase got cut down from the first draft, in order to meet the pesky First Directive of publishing magazines on rectangular paper: that the words must go all the way to the bottom right-hand corner and no further.
But, with Mike, we cannot resist the alternative reading that the press conference “must have gone on well past my bedtime”.
THE word “gay” used to mean, simply, “cheerful”. Our series last year on new meanings for old words (25 June 2011) reminded Chas Bazeley of a similar example. His wife Liz bumped into a former fellow debutante and introduced her to their sons as “one of the girls I came out with”.
“The expression on their faces was worthy of a cartoon,” says Chas. ” ‘Coming out’ is a rather different process these days.”
WHEN Jonathan Toomey turned on the TV for some post-lunch viewing on Christmas Day, the set announced in an error message that: “Yesterday does not exist; do you want to delete it Yes/No?”
Jonathan and his guests thought about it and agreed, on balance, that they would rather not have to go back and do it all over again – “not to mention the damage this might do to the space-time continuum”.
THIS is a bit creepy.
Akram Najjar’s friend was installing a software application. At one point, the installation wizard showed him the licence, which was quite long and involved a lot of scrolling. Akram’s friend was told to press “OK” to agree with the terms or “Cancel” if he did not.
He pressed “OK”. The wizard instantly came back with the message: “You did not have time to read it.”
FINALLY, what happens to all the other calls? Paul Brown phoned Centrelink, the Australian government department that looks after sickness, disability and unemployment support. He was taken aback when the recorded preamble advised him that “this call may be listened to”.